Matt's Reviews > The Caine Mutiny

“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?...I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know – that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”
- Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan Jessep, in A Few Good Men

“See, while I was studying law ‘n old Keefer here was writing his play for the Theatre Guild, and Willie here was on the playing fields of Princeton, all that time these birds we call regulars – these stuffy, stupid Prussians, in the Navy and the Army were manning guns. Course they weren’t doing it to save my mom from Hitler, they were doing it for dough, like everybody else does what they do. Question is, in the last analysis – last analysis – what do you do for dough? [Commander Queeg], for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours.”
- Barney Greenwald in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny is a turducken of a book. Its 537 pages are overstuffed with plots, subplots, and narrative excursions; with main characters, secondary characters, and cameos. Somewhere between the covers is a taut, 200-page legal thriller arising from the titular mutiny aboard the USS Caine, and the subsequent court-martial. I suspect some people will find the book bloated, and dislike or avoid it. Others, and I count myself among them, love it for that very reason. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is Tolstoyean in its scope and ambitions. For those with the patience to settle in and let a story unfold at its own pace, it has many rewards.

This is first and foremost a war novel, and a classic to boot. But it’s not your typical war novel. There is hardly a battle worth mentioning; just a few shots fired, and a lone kamikaze. In its way, it is more representative than its more action-packed predecessors. Only a fraction of soldiers and sailors actually experienced the terrible contest of battle. Most served in support roles, away from the front lines. The old, decrepit destroyer-minesweeper USS Caine serves on the fringes of war. She seldom sweeps any mine. Most of the time, she is relegated to escort duty or target towing. The sailors aboard her, most of them civilians just a short time before, are trying to get by as best they can. Here, boredom, tedium, and low-grade discomfort rule. Their greatest enemy is never the Japanese; it is rather their new commander, the high-strung Philip Francis Queeg.

Queeg is Wouk’s greatest creation. A paranoid Ahab who seems, at first blush, to be tyrannical, despotic, unbalanced, mendacious, and a coward. The officers aboard the Caine, especially the resident novelist, Lt. Keefer (something of a stand-in for Wouk), think him mad. Queeg’s incompetence – poor ship-handling, blame distribution, jumpiness under fire – lend credence to this belief. Wouk never allows you to get too comfortable with this idea, though. For The Caine Mutiny is also a psychological study, and it is always framing and reframing the story, so that the reader is never quite sure what to conclude. Is Queeg, in fact, mentally ill? Or are his officers, in fact, mutinously disloyal? The dialectic continues really until the last page.

Much of The Caine Mutiny a is Campbell-esque hero’s journey, except that in the world of destroyer-minesweepers, there aren’t really heroes. The main character, the man we follow most closely (Wouk employs an authoritarian, godlike third-person perspective) is young Lt. j.g. Willie Keith. In Wouk’s prologue, he portentously intones that the story to follow turns on Keith’s “personality as the massive door of a vault turns on a small jewel bearing.” Before we get to that point, however, we follow Willie through midshipmen school, to his posting on an admiral’s staff in Hawaii, and finally to his placement as communications officer on the Caine. We are also “treated” to his endless, consistently irritating relationship with lounge singer May Wynn. Of all the digressions Wouk takes, this is the hardest to bear. Yet, if it was taken away, I think it’d make for a lesser novel.

In The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Wouk gave us War and Peace transplanted to World War II. Those two massive novels are unparalleled reading experiences. In them, Wouk attempts to swallow the world. He tries to balance the cosmic with the intimate; to weigh the sheer scale of a world war against the concerns, fears, hopes, and doubts of individuals.

Wouk does a similar thing here, though on a lesser scale. He enjoys positioning the tininess of the Caine’s role against the massive backdrop of the Pacific War. He comments on the inability of the Caine’s officers and men to understand their place in the grand scheme of things. Wouk points out that we readers have an advantage over his characters, in that they cannot see over the horizon. This proves an effective technique in giving you an understanding of what it might have been like to serve in the backwater of the greatest conflict to ever roil the earth.

Wouk served on a destroyer-minesweeper during World War II, and his evocation of the experience is almost tactile. You spend a lot of time on the old Caine, with her peeling paint, her rusted deck, rank with the smell of sweat and stack gas. Wouk nails the monotony, the rhythms, and the protocols of naval service. Most of Wouk’s characters are reservists or draftees, who don’t respect or understand the Navy’s processes. Threaded into the narrative is Wouk’s defense of the institution, even when it seems aggressively wrongheaded. It feels like the lessons that Willie learn throughout the novel are the ones that Wouk himself probably learned. (In an almost apologetic forward, Wouk stresses that this is a fictional work, lest one think that such a thing as mutiny could ever happen in the U.S. Navy).

The pivotal moment of The Caine Mutiny is a typhoon. At the height of the storm, the executive officer Maryk (a decent man; a fisherman; perhaps the most likeable character in a book that is short on truly likeable characters) decides to remove Queeg from command using Article 184. This act gives the novel its title; surprisingly, though, it does not come across as a climax. It almost seems buried, arriving somewhere in the middle of a relatively hefty tome.

As a writer, Wouk has been damned by faint praise. He won the Pulitzer, but critics today tend to compliment him by focusing on the level of his ambition, rather than the crafting of his prose, or the validity of his insights. Partially, this is a tonal critique. Wouk is generally pro-military and sees war as a sometimes necessary evil, positions that never fit with postwar, Vietnam-influenced classics like Catch 22.

In terms of style, he is not formally daring, I suppose. This isn’t Mailer. A certain strand of conservatism runs through this work (and also The Winds of War and War and Remembrance). He has wiped away the “general obscenity and blasphemy of shipboard talk” in order to avoid – in his words – annoying “some readers.” The existence of sex – and talk about sex – is acknowledged as a possibility, but never described in detail. The result can be a little jarring. A story of shipboard life that feels absolutely true and, at the same time, patently false.

With that said, I think Wouk deserves a lot more acclaim. As in, he might be the best war novelist of all time. He is the master of the epic. His characters are interesting and fully realized. It is telling that none of the people in The Caine Mutiny are all good or all bad. They all have dimension. Willie is our protagonist, but he is as callow and irritating as hell for much of the time. Wouk’s sense of place is spot on. He is a grand assembler of detail, so that the novel’s world envelops you, whether that’s the Caine’s wardroom or a dingy New York City lounge. The dialogue, especially the court-martial, is also quite sharp, good enough to be transplanted almost verbatim into the film version (featuring Humphrey Bogart’s towering performance as Queeg).

The Caine Mutiny is a masterpiece, a powerful study of command, of loyalty, and of duty, set on one of the most unlikely stages of all: the antique decks of a misfit ship sailing at the outer periphery of world-historical events.